Are You Ready for the Country?
Reilly Tuesday
Our children are wearing the bathing suits your mother got them last summer at the Walmart near the side of the highway, off Exit 53. Don’t you remember, when we got all the way to the changing cabins at the beach only to realize we forgot to pack their bathing suits? One of them bends down to change the setting on the sprinkler, not jet, not mist, probably shower, and hair gets sopping wet.
I want to be thanking you for mowing the lawn earlier this morning as water whisks in circles, gentle streams, no beginning, no end. The soft grass, the loose strands leftover from this morning cling to the bottoms of soft bare feet. Love and life and laughter becomes us. We let them tire each other out and dry their heads with hand-me-down towels.
I need to use your charger - my phone’s almost dead. Fabric brushing against fabric, a gust from the sidewalk vent, the friction from readjusting my body in the vinyl restaurant booth - it all vibrates, it all feels like a notification. I jerk and pull it out. The light glows off the light, the light glows off the snow, the patent leather shoes I don’t want to admit how much I paid for glow in the fog of hundreds of headlights homeward. I convince myself once more that ordering UberEats is a deal with the devil and my soul is worth more than that.
I want to be making a homemade cake for your birthday, whipped cream and strawberries. I actually use a sifter for the flour and the cake actually gets eaten when I leave it on the kitchen counter after a triumphant initial cutting. The glass cake stand distorts the green sunlight coming in through the window over the sink, radiant across hoarse floorboards and a creaking screen door.
I want to come down, put the kettle on in the morning, then walk barefoot across the gravel, past the truck, to the end of the driveway and get the mail. At night, I listen for the spring peepers in the marsh and the crickets in the overgrown grass. Don’t you? By July, it’ll all be flowers. You whisper between the linens out on the line, one day, we could have a baby. I laugh between the sheets. Don’t you?
I need four shots in my coffee from the cafe just a few blocks away from your apartment near the bar with the free pool tables so I can make it through another day of writing captions for the exact same elevated basics over and over again. This time it will be punchy, clever, so relatable. I open things in new tabs. I let my imagination run wild. I get Instagram ads for The Bottle’s Natural Response Nipple that works like a breast releasing milk when baby actively drinks.
I want to be wanting you. Now, can you pull over? With the heat on and window down and Queen Anne’s Lace at 60 miles per hour. Don’t look at the roadkill and don’t put my knees on the dashboard. It’s dangerous if we crash. May is Motorcycle Awareness Month. Last fuel for 140 miles. The AM radio singers tell me what I want to hear but you don’t even have to ask. The campsite, the porch with the veranda, anywhere will do.
I need to order new contacts because I keep forgetting to put my glasses in my bag but I wish I brought them today so I could see the smile on the toddler’s face leaning down to talk to the baby ducklings across the pond at the park where you said you used to come to read. I wish I had brought my notebook so I could’ve written that down in cursive instead of in my Notes app.
On the walk over, I could see well enough to watch a boy breeze through the bike lane, reaching out so casually to so carefully pluck a single leaf from the branches spilling out above the road. Like he’d been waiting all day to pass that exact tree. Like he had planned to twirl it between his fingers, barely taking his eyes off the road, just to release it back on the wind. Like he knew something we haven’t figured out yet.
Are you reaching too? You like it, I know you like it, I know how you like it. I’m always saying I’m going to leave. Someday I’ll do it and I want you to come. Swing the ax. Lie down in the tall grass. Throw your Google Pixel Pro in the creek. It’ll be different, I know it. I know I don’t want to need anything. I know of a good clearing in the woods somewhere. We could come out the other side. Wouldn’t I look so good sprawled out across a white plastic lawn chair?
Reilly Tuesday always has something to say, and sometimes she writes it down. Her work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, The Drunken Canal, Moral Crema, Currant Jam, Expat Press and elsewhere, including Montreal-based publication The Page, which she created and edits.